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Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Wow! Vista's Been Here for 100 Days

The official launch of Windows Vista celebrates a 100 day milestone this week. Not everyone has embraced Windows Vista but Microsoft(MSFT) claims over 20 million licenses were sold in its first 30 days. They say it’s twice the adoption rate of Windows XP when it was released.

Unlike every other version of Window I still only use Vista on a test machine. In the past, I upgraded as soon as a new Windows was released. Everyone agrees, the new Aero interface is nice, but some have complained it can be a drain on laptop batteries. There also seems to be a love-hate relationship with the new User Access Control feature which makes Vista more secure.

It looks like Vista is here to stay and Microsoft is busy making improvements based on user feedback. According to an interview in WindowsITPro by Paul Thurrott, “Microsoft will fix or create drivers for any device that generates 500 or more user reports.” Maybe it’s really worth while to send those error reports to Redmond when your system crashes. According to Microsoft, the only exception appears to be “drivers for devices that are no longer sold because the company that made them went out of business”.

This week a number of fixes were included in auto updates for both Windows XP, Vista and Office. I’m sure Microsoft will keep them coming. I’ll probably wait until SP1 before I upgrade my main machine but obviously regular folks have been Wow’d by Vista.

1 Comments:

Anonymous said...

What does 20 million licenses sold in the first 30 days mean? Are most of those licenses pre-installed on new machines? Is it possible to know how many of those licenses were retail upgrades on existing machines? Seems like that would paint a better picture of whether Vista is being accepted or not.